done fiddling

As promised, this is what I ended up with as my version of Moira's secondhand snowflakes card. I didn't want to use the snowman, but I did have this santa stamp from Stampin Up with me on Satruday, so tried him instead.
Originally, I stamped him in browns on kraft card, but that didn't go with the blue snowflakes, so  I took the bits home and stamped him in smoky slate on white card, cut him out with framelits and then mounted him onto blue card. I cut the mat by hand after drawing round the die I used for santa - the next size up was way too big!

Diva Red September

 Had a great day yesterday with Moira and Janet out in the wilds at Gissing - at least this time I found the village hall first time (it's one of the 'best-kept secret' type, carefully hidden off road without a sign, so you can go past it even if you're looking for it). It was great to be joined by Eileen Godwin, so nice to meet the face behind the blog - and thanks Eileen for letting me plunder your Treasure Gold!
 This screen card was what we spent most of the morning on -as you can see, mine was mainly black and gold. The embossed black panels were rubbed with Treasure Gold white fire wax, then topped with die cut poinsettias and swirls - both Marianne dies- poinsettias had more Treasure Gold and rhinestone centres, and I think the greeting was Hobby Art. Having got the camera out to shoot the card, I couldn't resist taking one of a very concentrating Moira - but she looked up just as the flash went off!
Janet's two cards both used Clarity stamps (no surprise there). For the first one we brayered the card before stamping the tree in versamark and embossing in white, with bits of gilding in the leaves. I used Adirondack latte and Stampin Up coastal cabana inks, and the same inks were used to stamp the tree on the textured base card - the stripe was an offcut from the brayed card., and the mat was white centura pearl card. We all ended up with different colour schemes, from Eileen's very springlike greens to Moira's lovely grey/salmon combo with a brass tree
The last card used bleach on and around  the image, with sakura sparkle pen on the flower.
 There was another card, which I am still fiddling with.................
When Eileen's husband and dogs came to collect her, Holly decided to supervise, and nipped smartly onto Janet's chair - much more comfortable than the floor!

autumn days

 It's quintile time again - it seems to come round quicker each month at the moment, and I have yet again had to apologise for sending mine in late. This time I was searching for my build-a-tree set of stamps,  and eventually had to give up - doubtless I shall find them tomorrow, somewhere in plain sight!
Both tiles are landscape scenes, in what I hope you will see as autumn colours of distress inks with a couple of SU ones as well, using the traditional torn copy paper to make the hills
The first one uses the wall from landscape edges, stamped in black,
 then brushed with smoky slate and crumb cake inks, with a few patches of green marker pen in the cracks. The trees are from the  teeny tiny meadow set, coloured with green, coral and red markers.
The second tile again used the teeny tiny meadow stamps, with the foreground grasses from the floral edges set. This was the one that was due to have the tree on, and after much searching -every tree stamp i found was just the wrong shape - I decided to use one from let your heart sing. I inked up part of the stamp using versafine smoky grey, and stamped it off the edge of the tile. I used the grey as I didn't want ti to be too obvious, but thought afterwards that I should have used black and stamped off some of the ink.

Diva Red

 I don't normally get to any of the Diva Red workshops, but did manage the morning last Saturday, and these cards are the result.
I had to scan them both, as the weather is too lousy for the camera - and the birdcage is meant to be hanging straight down, not squiffy, but I ran out of patience fiddling with the scanner!
The birdcage was Moira's card, and took quite a time to do - and I don't think she has recovered yet from seeing that I did what I was told to do! (mind you, the fact that this session was held in the village hall and all Moira's stash was not available probably had a lot to do with that). it started out as a triple fold card, and the first double fold was cut using a spellbinder die and a grand caliber - this suffered from cutting through 2 layers of heavyweight card, so much so that it got really hot, and will probably have to end up in diecut hospital - which definitely took musclepower.
The front of the card and the insert were both stamped with a Clarity leafy swirl stamp, with a greeny embossing powder used on the front and perfect pearls on the insert. Birdcage was a Marianne die, butterflies spellbinders embossed with an embossabilities stencil, not sure where the swirl die came from. Hopefully Moira will blog the correct details sometime
Janet's contribution was the Christmas card using a Clarity stamps - the colour combination was right up my street, and it would be a very easy card to batch make; details are on Janet's blog, so you are spared my version of how to!

butterflies

I had trouble with this month's quintiles - too much choice! The theme was 'anything goes' , and I have a LOT of Chocolate Baroque stamps - in the end, as I was also supposed to be making ATCs I used the one theme for both sets 'Things that fly'. To my surprise I found that I only had one teeny tiny dragonfly stamp, so that ruled out using my gelli plate background using a dragonfly mask, so butterflies it was. Almost too much choice there, but I eventually found 2 matching butterflies in differing sizes, and used those for the quintiles.
The first one had a stippled background of distress inks, then the stamp from wild meadow repeat stamped to form the meadow effect - can never remember what sort this is, but it must be one of the most-used stamps from this set. The butterflies themselves were stamped n embossed in black, coloured with very ancient H2Os, cut out and glued on.

 The second tile I stamped the butterflies first, coloured with H2Os again, then went over them with a versamark pen and clear embossed them. The background uses distress inks and leaves from the garden as explained by Elaine. This gives a lovely effect, and is quite addictive - also works with die cut leaves.

 I used the same techniques for the ATCs, and the smaller of the butterfly stamps, with the addition of a punky flower stamp from a grab bag of stamps.

Clarity east

 Yesterday was a Clarity East workshop run by Janet - I think this was about the fourth one Janet has run, but the first that I was able to go to, and these are the card we made. As there was quite a lot of us, we split into 2 groups - one doing birdhouse cards, one Christmas with the holly tree. The Christmas ones were the more complicated, and I don't think anyone actually finished both cards in the time we had...........
My group started with the birdhouse stamp and the matching set of small stamps, and a rather nice floral stencil for the background (so nice one came home with me). We had a large selection of distress and adirondack inkpads to choose from, and I lazily used mostly the nearest ones, so my stencil background was mainly done in frayed burlap distress ink, with a dash of spiced marigold and and stonewashed. We cut the stencil down slightly, mounted it on black card, then on pearlescent white card base.

 The scene was stamped in black archival ink across a strip of white card before we added a moon and sky - sky was lake mist, tattered rose and mountain rose, with a bit of olive and peeled paint for the ground. Strip again on a thin mount of black card, trimmed at the sides to match the background layer.
Second card is all masked, and looks surprisingly dimensional when done................ We cut a mask for the centre first, and stamped the border around the edges using the leafy stamp from the set - I used frayed burlap again, with tattered rose and lake mist. Then we masked the border off and created our central scene - i used the same colours again, plus some mustard seed for the sun. I did the background first, using torn copy paper to make the hills, then put my birdhouse dead centre just to see if it would work.

 As some people didn't make it, I was one of the lucky ones to have a set of stamps to myself, so I had time to stamp another scene before lunch, and this is it.......using the leafy stamp to create tree branches, with stonewashed and mountain rose for the sky and lake mist for the ground. I put the cat in front of the birdhouse, as I thought he was a bit out of proportion anywhere else - when I got home I mounted this onto a 5.5" square of black card, then onto a 6x6" white card base.
In the afternoon we finished one card completely using the holly tree stamp, and most of the second card.

We stamped the holly tree onto white card, gold embossed it, coloured with perfect pearls, then cut it out. The background card was brayed in the corners with bottle and cranberry inks, then the holly sprays were stamped with versamark ink and dusted with perfect pearls. Holly tree stamped and embossed again in the centre, trunk painted then the cutout tree glued on top before mounting onto red card mat and a white card base.
The second card is still in pieces - hopefully Janet will have blogged it as it should have looked - mine is awaiting a nicer stamp to use in the centre of the two embossed and resist panels of holly at the sides ----------sorry, I really don't like the holly tree, so am still looking for a similar size replacement.................

canada goose

 Another card using the wetlands stamp set, and the same technique as the last post - on a bit of a roll here!
This time I added the canada goose (identification courtesy of ancient bird-spotters guide) which has been coloured using a water brush and baked brown sugar inkpad, with some wild wasabi marker pen over the rushes that he's standing in.
Both these cards are A6 landscape, and deliberately left without a greeting, as they are headed for my spares box...........

As the male room challenge is still open, I'm adding this one too